American here:
The only real long-term impacts it had on us can be summed up in two bullet points:
- normalizing overt, obnoxious patriotism, which absolutely served as a gateway drug to nationalism for huge swaths of the country
- establishing, normalizing, and entrenching surveillance + police state apparatuses in the US
That’s it.
“Never forget” is consummate bullshit for the vast majority of the country. I know this because the number of people who were immediately killed on 9/11 was just under 3000… and there was a period of several weeks during early COVID where we beat that death toll daily. And the response from huge swaths of the country was to go online and troll the “woke liberal elites” in urban areas that were being ravaged by the pandemic.
Nobody here cares about people dying. Only optics.
We’ve also had more people die from 9/11-related illnesses than in the collapse. It’s all about optics
The hypocrisy of people who screech “never forget” every year and then treat COVID as a hoax is sickening.
I remember the body bags immediately after 9/11. I remember the body bags of all the kids we sent to die in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I remember the body bags sitting in refrigerated trucks in alleyways during COVID because the morgues were full.
Unfortunately we didn’t really see the body bags of the countless civilians we killed in response to 9/11.
It’s really hard to not have contempt for the US after the past 25 years and much of the world has had that view MUCH longer.
The US killed more of its own people with 9/11 than Osama did, not by a small margin, by tenfold! Nobody cares about people dying indeed. It’s optics, even this post, your post and my post.
Whatever you “Americans” are blaming Orange Bad Man for, is due to Americans not acting up 20 years ago. And that happened because Americans didn’t intervene 40 years ago.
Zoom out and you’ll see it’s just a cycle, the biggest difference is this unfiltered baboon with direct access to the internet and social media. It doesn’t even matter which party leads, Obama was charismatic while blowing up multiple countries and directly supporting fucking ISIS/Daesh. To the rest of the world, republicans, democrats, same fucking difference.
I’m a little bit country, I’m a little bit Rock and roll! South Park, Season 7, episode 4, air date: April 9th, 2003! Still relevant today.
The terrorists actually won.
What unravelled the US was the Bush administration that took the opportunity to destroy any pretense that the US were every anything but a colonialist empire.
Right? The unraveling is coming from inside the house.
For America’s (former) allies, Trump is a godsend.
Other presidents would’ve dragged America’s allies in to America’s stupid conflicts, over and over again.
Bush did it, Obama did it, even Biden got Europe mixed up in the middle east again. And that whole bullshit in Ukraine the US was doing when oil was found prior to Russia’s involvement and invasions. Silent now, but the current Ukrainian invasion is partially due to the US attempting to project their power in Ukraine.
It took far to long for that pretense to come in to full view.
Not at all directly. Except it started a pattern of decades of wars started by Republicans and continued by Democrats.
I wonder if more 9/11s would make Americans more compassionate and anti-war or if they would just push them more into that Crusader-like “Deus Vult” mentality and reinvigorate American imperialism. 🤔
Did it? The US unraveled itself. Hell, we had been unraveling for 20 years already when it happened
